Take 5

1) It's the time of year for the Spring Bloggers' Quilt Festival over at Amy's Creative Side, so many amazing quilts to see already over there. Voting starts on 22/5, so if you want to enter a quilt you've still got time. I decided I'd enter my 'Fishing' Baby Quilt, into the Small Quilts Category, it's 160" in perimeter so fits nicely in there.

My quilt was inspired very much by my 'fish a day' sewing that I started earlier in the year, and after finishing the quilt, I'm back on the daily fish wagon:

Some of the jellyfish which appeared in the fishy bag, some rainbow striped fish and a little turtle. I'm starting to see the end quilt in my head as kind of an 'I spy under the sea' quilt.


2) Charity Shop buys - some lovely wool blankets...

And they said cushions with flowers to me. So, especially as I have no hand sewing on the go at the moment, I've been sitting cutting out petals and flowers from gorgeous, colourful wool scraps...

I might even get round to sewing them soon!


3) Calling all new Quilt bloggers, there's a blog hop, specifically for you, about to start. I participated in the 2014 Blog Hop and it was really useful, full of lots of tips - both quilting and blogging, and also a great way to get to know other bloggers. Here's the very basic info:

If you are interested in participating in the 2015 New Quilt Bloggers Blog Hop and have been blogging

1. mainly about modern quilting*,
2. for less than 2 years,
3. writing at least 4 posts a month,
4. are willing to agree to be actively involved in the blog hop through visiting and commenting on the other blogger’s hop posts,
5. and have or are willing to open a Facebook account to participate in the group discussions,

*Modern quilting to you is modern quilting to us.

Note that we will accept 100 participants for the blog hop this year. The sign up form will be available until May 31, 2015, or until we reach 100 participants.

You can find out more and sign up over at Quilting Jet Girl, who is one of the hosts this year. (And she also has 2 gorgeous quilts entered into the Bloggers' Quilt Festival, so look out for them.)

4) Another, very different, link for you - have you heard about 'Den Making Day' ? It's running from the 29/5 to the 6/6, in aid of Save the Children. The idea is that children are sponsored to create dens - whether that's behind a sofa, or at school, or in their gardens.

There's an adorable clip on You Tube, to promote the campaign:


Particularly with the disaster in Nepal so recently, supporting this campaign seems more important than ever. Save the Children estimate that just in Nepal, 2 million children have been affected by the earthquakes, 320000 children made homeless and 5000 schools destroyed.

And if you're looking for ideas and inspiration, as usual Pinterest is a very easy source - try this board with lots of child friendly ideas. I think my favourite on there might have to be this colourful teepee.

5) Following on nicely from that, I'll just share a few photos from my Saturday night at the weekend. I went camping in our local woods with the boys and 2 of their friends. Happily it was a lovely, sunny evening...

I had a small, pop up tent, but of course that was far too tame for the boys. Sam and one of their friends found a brilliant little den area, very sheltered and secluded within a clump of trees...

But Theo decided to build his own sleeping platform in a tree. There's a little source of scrap wood very nearby, which a building site puts out for the local community to use - I think the expectation generally is that it's free firewood, but Theo trotted off to scavenge some 'suitable' pieces there and brought them back to create this temporary (no nails or anything!) structure!

It was very difficult to capture the full glory of his sleeping platform on camera I'm afraid!

It was probably about 2.5 metres up in the tree, and despite its very precarious angle, Theo did demonstrate to me how difficult it was - due to the positioning of posts and branches - to actually completely fall out of bed. His pillow did slip off during the night, but when I went to check on him, just before 5am after being 'woken' (in inverted commas because I'm not sure I actually 'slept' at all during the night!) by an amazing dawn chorus, he was very much still asleep in his bed!

Despite it being a lovely, sunny evening, the night was really cold. And although I was in my tent, fully dressed in several warm layers with a woolly hat on all night, in a sleeping bag with 3 blankets and a coat over me, I did feel very chilled all night. And it brought it home to me a little more, how hard life must be for so many, children and adults, in Nepal at the moment who are struggling to find warmth and shelter.